Service providers are facing radio access network (RAN) congestion challenges as a result of the explosive growth in mobile data traffic. Current growth is being driven by increasing 3G and 4G penetration, widespread adoption of new smart phone devices, and increasing use of bandwidth intensive applications. Such growth has resulted in service degradation for mobile subscribers attached to congested cell sites and has created challenges in implementing fair usage policies to manage network congestion in the core network and in the RAN.
The congestion in a cell is primarily caused by one or more of the following types of traffic:                1. Circuit-Switched Traffic: Because circuit-switched calls are given higher priority compared to data sessions, excessive amounts of circuit-switched calls made by subscribers from a cell may contribute to cell congestion. Circuit-switched calls are allocated bandwidth resources during call setup, which is part of the total amount of resources available to the cell.        2. Signaling Traffic: Excessive amounts of signaling messages exchanged between the mobile phones and the radio tower may contribute to cell congestion. Excessive signaling messages are exchanged because of a number of factors including mobile phones trying to conserve battery power, interference from other cells, etc.        3. User Data Traffic: Excessive amounts of data usage by subscribers from smart phones and from 3G and 4G wireless cards (dongles) on their computers may contribute to cell congestion. Each data session is allocated a fixed amount of bandwidth during the session setup, which is a part of the total amount of bandwidth available to the cell.Each of these types of traffic individually and together contribute to cell congestion. It is desirable to find a way to fairly and efficiently control bandwidth usage in a cell. Accordingly, there exists a need for methods, systems, and computer readable media for PCRF and PIC based congestion control.        